


Three Years

by Rìgh_Marbh (Righ_Marbh)



Series: Pride of the Summer [4]
Category: Frey & McGray Series - Oscar de Muriel
Genre: M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-08-06
Updated: 2019-08-06
Packaged: 2020-08-10 14:30:24
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 654
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20136994
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Righ_Marbh/pseuds/R%C3%ACgh_Marbh
Summary: He might seem like a stubborn, cold-hearted rigid prick, but Ian has always been very good at adapting.





	Three Years

Ian has always been very good at adapting and even better and making sure no one realises he’s doing it. A little change of tone here, a different suit, a little white lie about his interests, feelings, opinions there. 

The only thing that has truly remained constant in 28 years is his coffee order.

Although given that both he and McGray took it as black as pitch, that might have to change soon as well. He can’t very well spend the rest of his life looking forlornly at his coffee or else he’ll never get anything done.

So one credit transfer to Oxford, thanks to the hasty invention of a family emergency (followed by the manifestation of one after his father is struck down, albeit briefly, by a rather nasty angina attack), a new flat far enough away to avoid dinner with his family and a promise to himself to not get involved with anything outside of lectures and exams later and Ian is…

…well he’s not _happy_ but it will just have to do.

Weekends are the worst and every Saturday morning for close to a year he wakes up, stares at his ceiling and sort of just waits for the phone call.

McGray will call.

He will.

But he doesn’t.

Eventually frustration turns to hurt and hurt turns to genuine anger and that calcifies into vindication.

And Ian’s heart calcifies along with it.

He’s awful, he knows, looking down his nose at everyone and holding himself aloof from the world at large and he’s reverting back to everything he thought he would never be again but that’s easier than working out where who he became in Scotland fits into the world he’d left behind.

The police work is a surprise, especially given his track record with the Met, but Sir Charles is an old family friend and, well, isn’t that how people like him are supposed to get ahead? So discussing a particularly vexing case after a tense family dinner one evening turns into Sir Charles asking his opinion here and there and somehow he ends up with a desk and an ID card and he’s still wondering when someone is going to wake up and realise he’s not supposed to be there.

He graduates from Oxford with a perfectly respectable history degree and just never seems to leave the Met because, to hell with getting there via family connections, he’s bloody _good_ at his job and between murders and drug rings and mobsters fencing stolen artworks, McGray eventually fades first to a dull ache and then to a distant memory.

And Ian has made a life for himself.

*

When Ian is summoned to St Pauls cathedral, he knows it’s all over. A spate of brutal murders, dubbed ‘The New Ripper’ by the scaremongering fools at _The Sun_ and _The Mail_ have left them stumped and Sir Charles (and subsequently Ian) had been running on borrowed time.

He takes great satisfaction in quitting, perhaps a little over dramatically that in necessary, before he is fired and only slightly regrets it when Sir Charles shows up to his flat to berate him before packing him off on a train to Edinburgh with only a confidential file and a suitcase to catch a copy-cat killer before the papers get wind of it.

His final hours in London are so frantic - packing up the flat, organising transport and somewhere to stay and sending messages to Elgie and, rather reluctantly, his family - that it’s only when he’s well past York that he has a chance to open the file and see what mess he’s about to be landed in the middle of.

When he reads the first sentence, he almost chokes on his tea.

_‘For the sake of keeping this out of the eyes of any reputable papers, you’ll be working under DI McGray. An unorthodox department but I expect you’ll make the best of it.’_

**Author's Note:**

> I have nine of these and ye Gods I hope I don’t have any more because I’ve run out of clever titles.


End file.
